Reading Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” sitting on the linoleum floor of my parents’ kitchen at 1am drinking Dragonwell from one of their tea cups after decanting it from my guywan. The guywan is one of my surviving tea instruments. Most of them were left behind as the detritus that serves as material collateral damage in a sudden breakup.

I’d had enough of her behavior and enough of my own self-deceit that she’d live up to her promises that she’d get better. Be better. More reliable.

So a thousand miles behind me and just shy of all of my personal belongings shed during the last four months, I block her phone number and only communicate with her through e-mail. I pay her rent, partially as a sort of non-legally-mandated alimony, partially because my name is still on the lease, and I work at forgetting that those months even happened. E-mails from her have, in only days, started to feel like waking up from a strange, confusing dream only to find that one of the characters had left a note in the waking world.